Mixwit

» see mixwit.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

mixwit was a very short, very american moment and i was on the wrong continent for it. in 2008 there was a little wave of sites that turned the mixtape into a web object, and mixwit made the prettiest version, a cartoon cassette you filled with songs and dropped onto your blog or your profile. it was the kind of thing that lived on american music blogs. by 2008 i was a working engineer in ankara and nowhere near that scene. i read about it later, the way you read about a party you were not at.

the idea was clever. mixwit did not host any music, it built a widget, an animated tape you could embed anywhere, and the songs streamed in from wherever they already lived on the web. you made a playlist, it looked like a real cassette with the reels turning, and you could pass it around. this let it sidestep the obvious problem of storing files. it did not let it sidestep the record labels, who took the view that anything that plays music needs their permission first.

earlier in 2008 the labels had leaned on muxtape, a similar site, and effectively ended it. the mixwit founders watched that happen and did the math on getting properly licensed. the numbers did not work, the economy was falling apart that autumn, and the fear of a lawsuit was enough on its own. no label ever actually sued mixwit. the founders shut it down anyway, in the middle of december 2008, because the risk was not worth it.

~ the case file ~

~ what got buried with it ~

mixwit died of a lawsuit that never happened, which is its own kind of ending. the threat did the work. a whole small category of mixtape-sharing sites got cleared out in 2008 not by court orders but by founders deciding not to find out. the mixwit team put out an open-source version of the widget afterward and moved on. the animated cassette was a nice idea that the licensing world had no room for.

~ the funny part ~

the mixtape was always a slightly illegal object. you were copying songs off records and radio onto a tape for a friend, and nobody sent lawyers. the second that same gesture moved to the web and became embeddable and countable, it turned into a licensing problem worth being scared of. mixwit built a clean digital version of a thing people had done casually for decades, and that was exactly what made it impossible to keep.

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